Admit it! All you guys REALLY want to know is who had how much snow today! Am I right?!?! We are fortunate here on SkiSoutheast to be able to obtain good, accurate intel from the ski areas (smile), some official Cocorahs reporters, and reliable sources at or within spitting distance of the ski areas and as of 7:30am here are those numbers!
Appalachian Ski Mountain – 16"
Beech Mountain Resort – 14"
Cataloochee Ski Area – 12"
Sugar Mountain Resort – 14"
Wolf Ridge Resort – 10"
Sapphire Valley Ski – 5"
For the rest of the Southeast ski area snow totals visit www.SkiSoutheast.com
Expect POW POW no matter where you head this morning! Be careful as roads are snow covered but drivable with 4WD and good tires. We have links to all of the DOT departments within each ski area available by clicking here> Ski Resort Road Conditions
We spoke with Brad Moretz at Appalachian Ski Mountain early this morning and he said their guys kept salting and working their entrance road all night and they probably have some of the best driving conditions of any of the ski areas today.
MORE SNOW IS FALLING! 
<Map compliments of Accuweather!
According to some weather peeps the BIG SNOW is over in North Carolina and most of the Virginia mountains with the numbers that we’re seeing up top about it for now. MORE SNOW is forecasted to wrap around and come in tonight with perhaps as much as 4" more snow coming in.
If you haven’t yet made those reservations to play in the snow at your favorite ski resort then what the ever-loving-heck are you waiting for! CALL TODAY or you’re going to miss out on one of the sweetest Christmas ski weeks/weekends in a while!
TRAFFIC ARE US!!!
It’s funny but around mid morning on Friday, we noticed that all of our 16 office computers began to grind to a slow crawl on the net. We have a 10/2 broadband connection for our surfing needs (we host the website offsite on a pipeline that is among the fastest in the country) but we were seeing no surfing speed at all. We called and complained only to find out that the streaming webcam feeds that we were serving within our office server was eating all of our upload allowance per second. We killed the video server and immediately went back to business as usual!
We knew right then that we were getting bombed with traffic and Urchin stats confirmed that this morning. Our ski and webcam network served up ONE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND page views on Friday! That is 1,568,419 pages that you guys viewed on Friday alone! We saw 88,104 unique visitors on Friday alone and you guys stuck around and looked at an average of nearly 18 pages of the website each!
That is nearly unheard of on the internet, unless you’re talking porn. Obviously WE were talking POWDER and you guys really wanted to see it. We had to tweak some of the webcam displays to handle the load and we’re already seeing some crazy traffic numbers this morning. With daylight revealing some incredible snowy views, we’re certain to break Friday’s mid December traffic record – today. We’re already seeing nearly a third of yesterday’s traffic number and it’s only 10am!
MAKING MOVES TO HANDLE THE GROWTH!
We’ve seen some 100,000+ visitor totals during mid January snows before but we had not experienced an 88,000+ visitor day in mid December before! With the obvious enthusiastic support of our new webcam technology where we are showing more live views than ever, and with the RECORD advertising support that we’ve had this season, we have installed a new super server with dual processors and mega memory/speed etc to handle the growth that we’re expecting as we move into the Christmas to January period. This new system is also allowing us 10 terabytes of bandwidth (traffic transfer) and with that we will be moving all of the LIVE Webcam feeds to that server which should take many of the faster, broadband cameras to nearly television quality. We hope to start implementing those moves on Monday or Tuesday.
I can’t wait to see how that proves out. Visit the great cameras at www.HighCountryWebCams.com (it may be a little glitchy today with all the traffic but the views are worth it!)
Here’s a full tour for your Saturday viewing pleasure!
Appalachian Ski Mountain – 24° – 16" of snow! Talked with GM Brad Moretz this morning and he said, "I don’t think we’ve ever had a snow forecast if 1-2 feet in one night here and we made a ton of snow all night. We’ve added 16" to our base in the last 24 hours and we’re 100% for today and deep!"
Brad told me that they would drop Hard Core, Thin Slice and Appaltop back to closed probably Sunday to focus snowmaking to build deep bases on those and reopen them on Wednesday to go 100% open again! He also shared that they were DONE making snow during the day now so go enjoy the powder and NO snowmaking!
Brad also said that they salted and worked the roads all night so they probably have the best roads into the ski area in the county.
Beech Mountain Resort – 20° – 14" of snow! As promised Beech is now open with 9 of 15 trails that now includes Upper and Lower Robbin’s Run. Gil Adams has said on Friday that Beech would have that open today and they do! Powder Bowl is also open for the first time this season as is Crossway and conditions could not be much sweeter than they will be today!
Cataloochee Ski Area – 25° – 12" of snow as of 6pm Friday night! They are 100% open and have the terrain park and tubing open as well. Powder!
Sugar Mountain Resort – 20° – 14" of snow! They had not updated their website as of 7:45am so we called up there and spoke with Michelle who told us that the updated ski report shows 15 trails open for today. A couple of our staffers told us that Tom Terrific is open so you adrenalyn junkies should enjoy that sweet trail with powder today. Call ahead for ice skating and tubing.
Wolf Ridge Resort – 28° – 10" of snow! They look to be open with 5 trails today and Rick Bussey mentioned that they will open more terrain pretty fast now! There’s some conflicting trail data from their website frontpage which lists 5 trails open, to the snow report page saying 6 trails to their actual trail listings only display 4 open. We’ll go with 5 trails and build from there. They posted, "What a great introduction to the Christmas Holiday break with between 8 to 12 inches of snow. Its Saturday morning and with more snow in the forcast we are expecting a great day at the Wolf. We presently have six runs open and will continue to open more as the weather allows. Come out early and be the first to enjoy the fresh powder. See you on the Slopes !!!"
Sapphire Valley Ski – 5" of snow. They were talking about opening but didn’t get much snow made lately so they are probably going to wait and open on Monday to be in great shape for the Christmas skiers and snowboarders coming in this week. The Frozen Falls Tubing park COULD open today but they say to call ahead.
Be sure to click over to www.SkiSoutheast.com to see who else had snow and how much! You can check the snow reports for all of the ski resorts of West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and North Carolina via https://www.skisoutheast.com/skireports.php as well as videos, photos and more.
Send your comments, videos, photos, trip reports and questions to: [email protected]